Earworm’s real name is Jordan Roseman. “I try to get a feel of what is in the zeitgeist,” he told Billboard. “Music has been going through a softer phase than it was a few years ago so there’s the return of adult contemporary.”

Coming to councils here soon? We are closely following the neo-liberal agenda in other matters. Making changes to limit health and safety provisions, privatising the health system by stealth. And don’t these leaders share the same advisors, Crosby Textor? Cameron is knighting Lynton Crosby this week for ‘contribution to public service’. Just like Key, using ‘honours’ system to reward their cronies. Satire can’t begin to compete with the reality we are witnessing.

London is building eveything and anything with public money! A bit like Auckland’s role in NZ.

However, the article does not seek to stop London getting the whims and whimsies of actresses and ex Etonians. No it suggests that equally all cities should be able to geld the public in the pursuit of ever more bridges, museums, lakes, cycleways, traffic lights, overpasses, underpasses, overpasses, contracts for drain maintenance unfilled, new stadia for watching gosling racing uncle tom cobley and all.

When are we going to get sane local government that pays fairly for good work done and stops the rapidly geometrically increasing debt spiral.

Speaking of things/infrastructure to help people stay dry and elevated in that far off hallowed land—

### NZ Herald Online
Source: Daily Mail (UK)Britain overwhelmed by widespread flooding
Britain was overwhelmed by the most widespread flooding for decades yesterday as the dire weather left a trail of chaos stretching hundreds of miles and affecting 2,000 homes. Huge swathes of the North of England, including parts of Manchester and Leeds and their satellite towns, were under up to 6ft of water after a month’s rain fell in a single day.Read more

Bless the British authorities’ wet cotton socks, no-one is blaming this flood on ‘climate change’, not just yet anyway. Listen and learn.

And as to democracy, just where did our elected officers get the right to not invest public money on profitable ventures? I do not remember such a mandate on any ballot paper I saw. Council should appoint a professional money manager successful over a measured period of time and stay out of financial markets. None of the councillors (that’s zero) has shown a great deal of skill the like of George Soros or Berkshire Hathaway, in fact they have got the average Dunedin ratepayer into a $15,000 debt per capita. And they complete investments into stadiums, remakeable cycle lanes and non charging museums that divest dollars annually in staff and maintenance.

Surely they realise that the Waipori fund needs enormous profit growth to offset their other stuffups.

Investment advisors and decision makers – poppycock.

The next investments will be in worm farms, morris dancing stadia and pram pushing racing. You heard it first here.

Zeitgeist: Spirit of The Age; ghost in the machine. We have a bit of a mash up. On shellac: “How do you do? My name is Sue/ Now you’re going to/Hamilton, Hamilton, crappiest Street you ever bin in, no one there should treat you mean, in Hamilton, their Hamilton/Surely, Dinsdale?/Dont call me Shirley Dinsdale”. Record ends.

### Stuff.co.nz Last updated 11:15 18/12/2015Parking meters a put-off for Hamilton shoppers
By Lianne Mylie
Has the Hamilton City Council considered for one moment why The Base, a shopping centre in the city’s north, is so popular? This is a business and retail success model that needs and deserves to be studied closely, and that our city council ought to have learnt from long ago.

The first thing that needs to happen to encourage people back into Hamilton city centre is to take away the parking meters.

No-one uses coins these days, and no-one is happy paying for parking when they’re going to shop, eat out or relax at the movies. Parking meters are so archaic and outdated – very unfriendly and unwelcoming too. If you want our custom then the only way this is going to happen is by allowing us to park our cars at no cost and without any time restriction.Read more + Comments

The elephant in the room. Parking meters, parking management, 152+ cars, too many DCC cars, parking buildings, less car parks at hospital due to cycleways, overkill on dog control cars and traffic lights.

Not a bad list for councillors and CEO to consider carefully this year. Imagine the goodwill and improvement in persona of the DCC if it just closed all the departments involved above down immediately.

The saving in salaries and wages would eliminate over time your liability of $15,000 to the DCC.

The greatest good for the greatest number. Sure 200 would require redundancy and resettlement in other jobs where their skills may be needed, in another town possibly, but 43,500 ratepayers would be better off.

I’d even vote for those suitably qualified of the resettlers to be eligible for mudtrap cleaning, street sweeping or other jobs of real benefit to their paymasters, the ratepayers.

[Dunedin] Car-using friends have been grumbling about parking meters that don’t work, meaning they have to take a walk further along to find one that does, so they can pay for a ticket, then walk back to place it in the window of the vehicle, before commencing what they drove to town for.
The meters haven’t been vandalised, they’ve just run out of paper. Drivers might wonder if ultra planet-saving measures are responsible for wasting their time and pissing them off. Save a tree, don’t replace the ticket paper till it’s run out – that sort of thing. Funny, the ideas some people come up with!

ABSTRACT
Remix–or the practice of recombining preexisting content–has proliferated across media both digital and analog. Fans celebrate it as a revolutionary new creative practice; critics characterize it as a lazy and cheap (and often illegal) recycling of other people’s work. In Of Remixology, David Gunkel argues that to understand remix, we need to change the terms of the debate. The two sides of the remix controversy, Gunkel contends, share certain underlying values–originality, innovation, artistic integrity. And each side seeks to protect these values from the threat that is represented by the other. In reevaluating these shared philosophical assumptions, Gunkel not only provides a new way to understand remix, he also offers an innovative theory of moral and aesthetic value for the twenty-first century.